the late school elections, “The first lady to deposit her ballot was
Miss ——, a teacher in the high school.” Who else should be first? I do
not think that men generally comprehend how absurd it is to an
experienced teacher, who has for years been putting into the brains of
dull boys all the activity they possess, to see those boys grow up to be
men and voters, and decide what to do with the money she pays in taxes,
while she is set aside as “only a woman.” Her pupils cannot make a
speech in town-meeting, they cannot present a report on any subject,
they cannot show any capacity of leadership, without exhibiting the
influence she has had over them. Yet they are now as entirely beyond her
direct reach as if she were a hen who had hatched ducklings, and had
lived to see them swimming away. But the teachers are worse off than the
hens; because they have actually taught their ducklings to swim, and
could swim themselves if permitted. After all, Horace Mann builded
better than he knew. Every step in the training of women as teachers
implies a farther step.
LVI.
“CUPID-AND-PSYCHOLOGY.”
The learned Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, England, is frequently
facetious; and his jokes are quoted with the deference due to the chief
officer of the chief college of that great university. Now, it is known
that the Cambridge colleges, and Trinity College in particular, are
doing a great deal for the instruction of women. The young women of
Girton College and Newnham College,—both of these being institutions for
women, in or near Cambridge,—not only enjoy the instruction of the
university, but they share it under a guaranty that it shall be of the
best quality; because they attend, in many cases, the very same lectures
with the young men. Where this is not done, they sometimes use the
vacant lecture-rooms of the college; and it was in connection with an
application for this privilege that the Master of Trinity College made
his last joke,—the last, at any rate, that has crossed the Atlantic.
When told that the lecture-room was needed for a class of young women in
psychology, he said, “Psychology? What kind of psychology?
Cupid-and-Psychology, I suppose.”
Cupid-and-Psychology is, after all, not so bad a department of
instruction. It may be taken as a good enough symbol of that mingling of
head and heart which is the best result of all training. One of the
worst evils of the separate education of the sexes has been the easy
assumption that men were to be made all head, and women all heart. It
was to correct the evils of this, that Ben Jonson proposed for his ideal
woman
“a learned and a manly soul.”
It was an implied recognition of it from the other side when the great
masculine intellect, Goethe, held up as a guiding force in his Faust
“the eternal womanly” (_das ewige weibliche_). After all, each sex must
teach the other, and impart to the other. It will never do to have all
the brains poured into one human being, and christened “man;” and all
the affections decanted into another, and labelled “woman.” Nature
herself rejects this theory. Darwin himself, the interpreter of nature,
shows that there is a perpetual effort going on, by unseen forces, to
equalize the sexes, since sons often inherit from the mother, and
daughters from the father. And we all take pleasure in discovering in
the noblest of each sex something of the qualities of the other,—the
tender affections in great men, the imperial intellect in great women.
On the whole, there is no harm, but rather good, in the new science of
Cupid-and-Psychology. There are combinations for which no single word
can suffice. The phrase belongs to the same class with Lowell’s witty
denunciation of a certain tiresome letter-writer, as being, not his
incubus, but his “pen-and-inkubus.” It is as well to admit it first as
last: Cupid-and-Psychology will be taught wherever young men and women
study together. Not in the direct and simple form of mutual love-making,
perhaps; for they tell the visitor, at universities which admit both
sexes, that the young men and maidens do not fall in love with each
other, but are apt to seek their mates elsewhere. The new science has a
wider bearing, and suggests that the brain is incomplete, after all,
without the affections; and so are the affections without the brain. The
very professorship at Harvard University which Rev. Dr. Peabody is just
leaving, and which Rev. Phillips Brooks has been invited to fill, was
founded by a woman, Miss Plummer; and the name proposed by her for it
was “a professorship of the heart,” though they after all called it only
a professorship of “Christian morals.” We need the heart in our
colleges, it seems, even if we only get it under the ingenious title of
Cupid-and-Psychology.
LVII.
MEDICAL SCIENCE FOR WOMEN.
In reading, the other day, a speech on the Medical Education of Women,
it struck me that the most important reason for this education was one
which the speaker had not mentioned,—the fact that the medical
profession stands for science; and that women peculiarly need science,
since their natural bent is supposed to be a little the other way. The
other professions represent tradition very generally: the lawyer must be
bound by precedents; the clergyman generally admits that he must go back
to his texts. But the physician claims, at least, to be a man of
science, and stands for that before the world. Hence the sacredness with
which his position has always been surrounded. The Florida Indians,
according to the early voyagers, not only took the physician’s medicine,
but they took the physician himself internally, after his death. All
other men were buried; but the body of the physician was burned, and his
ashes mixed with water, by way of a permanent prescription.
At any rate, the physician himself popularly stands for science; and, in
this point of view, his position is very noble. I have known physicians
whose professed materialism was more elevated than most of what the
world calls religion. To trace that wondrous power called life, which
takes these particles of matter, and makes them think with thought, or
glow with passion, or put forth an activity so intense as to be the
parent of new life from generation to generation,—this study is
something sublime. He who reverently ponders on this may call himself
theist or atheist, he is yet worthy to be revered: if he can teach us,
he blesses us. “I touch heaven,” said Novalis, “when I lay my hand on a
human body;” and the popularity among physicians of that fine engraving
of Vesalius standing ready for his first dissection, shows that they
take a higher view of their vocation than the world sometimes admits.
It seems to me peculiarly important that women should have a share in
these studies. They often have time enough. It takes more time for a
woman to make herself charming than to make herself learned, Sydney
Smith says; and he thinks it a pity that she should often hang up her
brains on the wall in poor pictures, or waft them into the air in poor
music, when they might be better employed. Yet a great physician, Dr.
Currie, says in his letters that he always preferred to have an ignorant
patient bring his wife with him, because he could always get more
careful observation and quicker suggestions from the woman. This point
lies directly in the line of medical education.
The study lies also directly in their path as prospective wives and
mothers, and this alone would furnish a sufficient reason for it. A
woman of superior gifts, who had studied medicine, but never adopted it
as a profession, told me that the mere domestic use of her knowledge had
more than repaid her for all the trouble it had cost. For a man who
should thus abandon the pursuit, it would be of comparatively little
service, apart from the general training; but for a woman, if she
fulfills the commoner duties of a woman’s life, this early knowledge
will always be a source of direct strength. This applies in a degree to
surgery also; and I have always wondered, in view of the old proverb
that a surgeon should have “a lion’s heart and a lady’s hand,” why our
professors do not oftener aim at developing this heart, if need be, in
those who have the hand without training.
LVIII.
SEWING IN SCHOOLS.
Mr. N. T. Allen, of West Newton, Mass., who has had much experience and
success as a teacher of both sexes, has been visiting the German public
schools. He has lately given an interesting report of his observations
to the Middlesex County Teachers’ Association. The reporter says (the
Italics being my own),—
“Mr. Allen paid particular attention to the Dorf Schule of the
cities, and the Bürger Schule of the country, both being of the
lower grades; and contended that the educational system of Germany
was far from being perfect, and was inferior in certain respects to
that adopted in some of our own States, and carried into successful
operation in several towns and communities. It was compulsory and
autocratic, in that parents were not allowed any choice in the
education of their children; _it was unjust toward girls, in
establishing and perpetuating the idea of their great mental
inferiority to the boys_; it was undemocratic, in having different
schools for different castes and classes of society; and it was
extremely sectarian and bigoted in the religious dogmatic
instruction prescribed and forced upon all.”
It is well known that in the German schools a certain number of hours
are given by the girls to sewing, and that their course of study, as
compared with that of the boys, is narrowed to make room for this. It is
for this reason that I, for one, dread to see sewing brought into our
public schools. So strong is still the disposition in many minds to put
off girls with less schooling than boys, that it seems unsafe to provide
so good an excuse for this inequality.
The whole theory of industrial schools is liable to a similar
danger,—that of introducing class distinctions into our education. It
tends toward that other evil of the German system, described by Mr.
Allen, “having different schools for different castes in society.” I
hold to the old theory of providing all boys and girls, whatever their
parentage or probable pursuit, with a good basis of common-school
education, and then trusting the intellectual faculties, thus sharpened,
to help them in the struggle for life. Just as it was found in the army
that a well-educated young man who had never handled a musket soon
overtook and passed a comrade of inferior brains who had been in the
militia from boyhood, so is it found to be with those whose minds have
been well taught in our public schools. But whether this criticism
holds, or not, against industrial schools, as such, it certainly holds
when we further make an industrial discrimination against all girls.
This we do, if we take an hour of their time for sewing, when the boys
give that hour to study.
But it will be said, Ought not girls to be taught to sew? Undoubtedly.
All boys ought to be taught the use of hammer and plane and
screw-driver, and, for that matter, plain sewing also. Girls need sewing
no doubt; and they should be taught it at home, or at school, or
wherever they can find a teacher. But, for all this, to assign to sewing
any thing like the same relative importance that belonged to it a
hundred years ago, or even twenty years ago, is to overlook the changed
conditions of modern society. Let us consider this a moment.
The Old-World theory was that all imaginable hard work was to be done by
human hands. But the New-World theory is—for it is a New World wherever
the theory is recognized—that all this work should be done, as far as
possible, by human brains. Napoleon defined it as his ultimate intention
for the French people, “to convert all trades into arts,” the head doing
the work of the hands. This applies to woman’s work as much as any
other. The epoch of private spinning and weaving was an epoch of
barbarism; the vast mills of Lowell and Fall River now do that toil. The
sewing-machine does a day’s work in an hour. But all this machinery came
out of somebody’s brain, and is adapted to a race of women with brains.
The treasurer of half a dozen manufacturing corporations told me last
week, that, though the mills were filled with French and Irish, the
superiority of American “help” was just as manifest as ever, and the
manufacturers would gladly keep them if they could: they could almost
always tend more looms, for instance. Those who have tried to teach the
use of the sewing-machine to the Southern negroes or poor whites know
how hard it is. A sewing-machine is a step in civilization: its presence
in a house, like that of a piano, proves a certain stage of advancement.
Its course runs parallel with that of the common-school; and an agent
for this machine, like those who sell improved agricultural implements,
would instinctively avoid those regions where there are no schoolhouses.
I do not undervalue the use of the hands, or the need of physical
training for both boys and girls. But, after all, the hands must be kept
subordinate to the head. If industrial training is to be the first
thing, then every Irish parent who takes his ten-year-old girl from
school, and sends her to the factory, is in the path of virtue. If, on
the other hand, it be found that some time can be advantageously taken
from books, and given to some handiwork, without loss of intellectual
progress, that is a different thing. That is only an intellectual
eight-hour bill or five-hour bill; and, for one, I should gladly favor
that. But let it be done as securing the best education for all; not as
a class-education, or as merely utilitarian: and let it be done as
rigidly for boys as for girls. Let us not set out with the theory that a
boy may avail himself of all the divisions of labor in modern society,
but that every girl must still spin her own cloth, and sew her own seam.
LIX.
CASH PREMIUMS FOR STUDY.
On looking over the Harvard College catalogue, I am struck with the
great pecuniary inducements which are held out to tempt young gentlemen
to study. There are, to begin with, one hundred and seventeen
“scholarships;” yielding incomes ranging from $40 to $350 annually, but
averaging $225. The total income of these is $19,635. Then there are
“loan” and “beneficiary” funds, amounting to $4,700 annually, and given
or lent in sums from $25 to $75. Then there are “monitorships,” yielding
$700 per annum; and various money prizes, amounting to some $1,200. The
whole amount that is or may be paid in cash to undergraduates every year
is more than $25,000, which may perhaps reach a hundred and fifty young
men. No wonder that the catalogue asserts that “The experience of the
past warrants the statement that good scholars of high character, but
slender means, are seldom or never obliged to leave college for want of
money.”
Probably one-sixth of the eight hundred undergraduates of Harvard
College receive direct pecuniary aid in studying there; and, as
scholarship is an essential in securing most of this pecuniary aid, it
is probable that half the high scholars in every class are thus directly
helped. Observe that this is in addition to the general value of the
college endowments to all students, over and above what they pay for
tuition,—an amount lately estimated by the academical authorities at one
thousand dollars, at least, for every graduate. Apart from all this, I
was told many years ago, by that very acute observer, the late President
James Walker of Harvard University, that in his opinion one-quarter of
the undergraduates were maintained in college through the personal
self-denial and sacrifices of mothers and sisters.
But what a tremendous protective tariff, what an irresistible
“discriminating duty,” is this! While boys are thus bribed largely, year
by year, to come to Cambridge, and study,—so that the influence of all
this promise of pecuniary aid is felt through every academy and high
school in the land,—we find, on the other hand, that every girl who
wishes to pursue similar studies is expected to pay at the full market
rates for all she gets, and even then cannot enter Harvard College. In
some of our normal schools her board may be paid, I believe, on
condition that she becomes a teacher; but I know of no place where she
herself is paid, as young men are paid, merely to come and study.
Ex-Gov. Bullock founded one scholarship at Amherst, of which the income
is to be given by preference to a woman—when a woman is admitted! But
unfortunately that time has not come. And yet those who sit by the banks
of this golden stream, and monopolize all its benefits, have a tone of
sublime contempt for those who are not permitted to approach it, and
never can quite forgive the impecunious condition of these outcasts!
“Your scholarship is not to be compared to ours,” they say to women.
“Certainly not,” the women may fairly reply: “we were never paid
salaries that we might become scholars.”
The thing that perpetually neutralizes all claims of chivalry, all
professions of justice, all talk of fairness, as between the sexes, is
this class of facts. Woman is systematically excluded from training, and
then told she must not compete; if admitted to compete, she is so
weighted by artificial disadvantages, that it is hard for her to win. If
her brain is inferior, she should be helped; if her natural obstacles
are greater, all other hinderances should be the more generously swept
away. Give girls a chance at a high school, they use it, and they there
equal boys in scholarship; in our academies, in our normal schools,
there is no deficiency on their part. Even in our colleges they ask, as
yet, only admittance, not cash premiums. Only admit them, and see if
they do not hold their own unpaid, with the young men to whom you pay,
collectively, twenty-five thousand dollars a year to stay there. Only a
seat in a recitation-room, to be paid for at the full price,—is this so
very much for a young girl to ask? Do be at least as generous as that
school committee in a Massachusetts town which shall be nameless, who
said seriously in their report, speaking of a certain appointment, “As
this place offers neither honor nor profit, we do not see why it should
not be filled by a woman”!
LX.
MENTAL HORTICULTURE.
There was once a public meeting held, at the request of some excellent
ladies, to consider the question whether it might be possible for roses
and lilies to grow together in the same garden. Many of the ladies were
quite used to gardening, and had opinions of their own; but, as it was
not proper for them to open their lips before people, they of course
could not testify. So several respectable gentlemen—clergymen and
professors—were invited to tell them all about it. Some of these
gentlemen had seen a rose, and some had seen a lily, but it turned out
that very few of them had ever happened to see a garden. Still, as they
were learned men, they could give very valuable suggestions. One of them
explained, that, as roses and lilies assimilated very different juices
from the soil, they could not possibly grow in the same soil. Another
pointed out, that, as they needed different proportions of sun and of
air, they should have very different exposures, and therefore must be
kept apart. Another, more daring, suggested, that, as God had put the
two species into the same world, it was quite possible that they might
grow in the same enclosure for a time, perhaps for about fourteen years,
but that, if they were left longer together, they would certainly blight
and destroy each other. All this seemed very conclusive; and the meeting
was about to vote that roses and lilies should never be allowed to exist
in the same garden, unless with a brick wall twenty feet high between.
But it so happened that a sensible gardener from a distant State was
present, and got up to say a word before the debate closed. “Bless your
souls, my good people, what are you talking about?” said he. “Roses and
lilies are already growing together by the thousand, all over the
country, and you may as well close your discussion.” Upon which the
meeting broke up in some confusion: the brick wall was never built; but
the clergyman went back to his study, the professor to his lecture-room,
the physician to his patients, and all remained in the conviction that
the gardener was a good sort of man, but strangely ignorant of
scientific horticulture.
“Which things are an allegory.” The writer has been reading the report,
in the Boston Daily Advertiser, of a recent debate on female education.
I suppose that those born and bred in New England can never quite
abandon the feeling that this region should still lead the nation, as it
once led, in all educational matters. For one, I cannot help a slight
sense of mortification, when, in an assemblage of Boston professors,
undertaking to discuss a simple practical matter, everybody begins in
the clouds, ignoring the facts before everybody’s eyes, and discussing
as a question of theory only, what has long since become a matter of
common practice. The mortification is not diminished when the
common-sense has to be at last imported from beyond the borders of New
England, in the shape of a college president from Central New York. To
him alone it seems to have occurred to remind these dwellers in the
clouds that what they persisted in treating as theory had been a matter
of daily experience in half the large towns in New England for the last
quarter of a century.
What is the question at issue? Simply this: New England is full of
normal schools, high schools, and endowed academies. In the majority of
these, pupils of both sexes, from fourteen to twenty-five or
thereabouts, study together and recite together, living either at home
or in boarding-houses, or in academic dormitories, as the case may be.
This has gone on for many years, without cavil or scandal. As a general
rule, teachers have testified that they prefer to teach these mixed
schools; at any rate, the fact is certain, that the sexes, once united
in schools of this grade, are very seldom separated again; while we
often hear of the separate schools as being abandoned, and the sexes
brought together. Certainly the experiment of joint education has been
very extensively tried in all parts of New England; indeed, for schools
of this kind, in most regions, the association of the sexes is the rule,
their separation the exception. Now, the only remaining question is:
This being the case, will it make any essential difference if you widen
the course of instruction a little, and call the institution a college?
This is really the only problem left to be solved; and yet on this
question, thus limited, not a speaker at the above—except President
White of Cornell University—had apparently a word to say. Every other
speaker appeared to approach the general theme in as profound and
blissful an ignorance as if he had lived all his life in Turkey or in
France, or in some other country where no young man had ever recited
algebra in the same room with a young woman since the world began.
EMPLOYMENT.
“The non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the ages of
combat. But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have now
marvellous ways of winning their way in the world; and mind without
muscle has far greater force than muscle without mind.”—BAGEHOT’S
_Physics and Politics_, c. ii., § 3.
LXI.
“SEXUAL DIFFERENCE OF EMPLOYMENT.”
I am at a loss to understand an assertion made by Rev. Dr. Hedge, at an
educational meeting in Boston, that “the course of civilization hitherto
has tended to develop and confirm sexual difference of employment.” He
adds, according to the report in the Daily Advertiser, that, “the more
civilized the country, the more the vocations of men and women divide:
the more savage the nation, the more they blend and coincide.”
With due respect for Dr. Hedge on many grounds, and especially as having
been the first man to demand publicly in presence of the Harvard alumni
the admission of women to the university, I must yet express great
surprise at his taking what seems to me so utterly untenable a position.
To me it seems, on the contrary, that it is the savage period which is
remarkable for the industrial separation of the sexes; and that every
epoch of advancing civilization—as the present—blends them more and
more. The fact would have seemed to me so plain as hardly to need more
than simply to state it, but for the authority of Dr. Hedge upon the
other side.